Blog
OpenID Working
For those who wanted to use OpenID to authenticate themselves on my site, it should now work. There were some problems reported with logging in because my PHP was not compiled with the GMP library. You should and are encouraged to start using OpenID in many places, if possible.
New Life in the Heart of Minneapolis
About five years ago, I was walking around on the streets of Chicago Ave. and Lake St. in Minneapolis and we were talking about Christ and praying with people in the neighborhood. There were many homeless and very poor people walking around and it was a tough neighborhood. We told people that we wanted to make the neighborhood better by leading them to Christ. I remember one man saying, "If you want to help out this neighborhood, buy that building."
The building he was referring to was the Sears, Roebuck and Company Mail-Order Warehouse and Retail Store in the middle of South Minneapolis. According to the Wikipedia article on the site, it was built in 1927 and is the second-largest building in the state to the Mall of America. It's a huge, old stone building that was closed by Sears in 1994 and has a 211-foot tower that climbs above the surrounding area.
I was told that the neighborhood was getting a bit better but I hadn't been down there since then. A couple years ago I started hearing about a large redevelopment project on the property. I heard they were putting in some fancy condos and was worried that they'd drive all the people out of the neighborhood and just bring in lots of richer people. Thankfully, that did not happen.
Today I went into the building for the first time to get my state ID card renewed. I found that past the beautiful entryway and down in the basement was the nicest DMV office I've ever seen. It wasn't busy, looked great, and had fancy computer systems that called my number when they were ready to help me. 
(She said there was a glare on my glasses for the ID photo, and she asked if I'd take my glasses off. I bet I'm making a funny face just because I didn't have my glasses on.) Of course, I decided to stick around and find a bit more about the building.
Of course, the condos were there. I didn't see them, but The Chicago had a big presence in the signage and I've seen plenty of ads over the last couple years. I think a condo on the 10th floor of that tower would be so cool to have, overlooking all of Minneapolis. Of course, they are expensive, new property though. There's a lot of rentable office space there too, with a large Allina Health office on the main floor. I just realized that there's also a large section that is apartments for rent, many of which to people of moderate incomes
The biggest community benefit, though, is the Midtown Global Market on the south half of the first floor. It reminds me a lot of the State Fair because it's a large smorgasboard of items in a crowded marketplace. There was clothing, jewelry, art and collectibles, plus plenty of foods from all over the world. The many cultures that live in the neighborhood were all there to hang out with friends and enjoy life together. It's great that there's a year-round place just to congregate in public. Next time I'll have to remember not to each lunch before I go too!
Hats off to the city for doing a good job at bringing life into the neighborhood. It was really needed, and it seems like it helped out a bunch. Find out more information about the building and the Midtown area at the Midtown Exchange News site.
Apple and Windows Software
Dear Apple,
Some of us can't afford the MacBook Pro you've brainwashed us all into buying yet, OK? We love you, but you're just a bit too much to afford. Sure, I could not eat for a year and then get a computer, but, frankly, I like to eat.
So, of course, since I have a Dell desktop, I get to use Windows because I like to get things done and installing Ubuntu wouldn't be worth the six months of lost productivity, although it would be a learning experience. So what does it have to do with you? I know it's hard, but y'all need to start publishing decent Windows software.
Seriously, find some people that know how to write Windows code or who don't complain about it the whole time or something. The guys on the team right now are total jerks. If you tell me that Mac OS X is written by the same people who write iTunes for Windows, I might just go out and buy a cheaper laptop and skip the beautiful brushed metal and pretty interface.
What are my "whines", for those who listen to MacBreak Weekly? Well, for one, why can't iTunes be a multi-user application? If I have it running on my user account all the time to share my library with friends, nobody else can open iTunes. OS X has it working and so does every other Windows program. Get with it.
OK, and then I took the bait earlier this week and updated to the latest versions of iTunes and QuickTime. Thanks. But no thanks. I tried to watch the latest from the RSS feed of the latest Movie Trailers, but the trailers wouldn't show up. I even went to the trouble of checking through Internet Explorer because I thought maybe your testing monkeys miss the FireFox icon. But no, QuickTime is now mostly unusable.
Next time, find some Windows users on the street and stick your software in front of them for an hour and give them $10. They'll tell you some interesting stuff. They might not be as cheap as your monkeys, but they'll get the job done.
Maybe next week if you push out a patch, I'll talk about the Apple features I like. I'm looking forward to it.
Thanks,
Dan Ficker
A Three-Dimensional Display?
It looks kinda interesting. Kevin found this interesting bit of news that someone has developed an interactive three-dimensional display. Apparently the picture is projected in 3-D and there may be some sort of small particles that make the picture hang in the air. For more information and a video or two, check out the technology's official page.
The Server Debacle
Avid readers of my blog and fans of my other associated sites may have noticed that my site was down for almost nine hours today. I'm very sorry about that if you rely on any of my server's services. Believe me, I didn't like it any more than you did.
I figured out that I could get newer versions of software by using the apt-get command. I wasn't happy with the version selection inside the confines of my hosting company's distributions, so I changed my /etc/apt/sources.list to include the main Debian package repositories. Over lunch I performed a major upgrade of a bunch of that software.
During a couple of these updates, it asked me if I wanted to overwrite a file or two. I looked at the diffs of the files and it seemed to be harmless enough, and, well, the apts almost always work well and were coming directly from Debian. So, I loaded up the new file and finished upgrading. I figured it would be a good time to restart the machine just to make sure everything updated correctly That's when I realized it didn't go so well.
My server did not come back up. Luckily, my hosting company, 1&1, has this great tool called a Serial Console. Apparently they have all their machines in their large data center wired up to a big KVM switch that doesn't need to have Ethernet connectivity. So, I logged into the central console and could interact with my server as if I was right inside the data center. Geniuses!
I tried, but I just couldn't figure out why the Internet couldn't communicate. At that time I read something in the FAQ saying that under no terms should you mess with the routing or networking settings on your server because it probably wouldn't work anymore. Well, too late for that. I guess I'll have to find something else.
I called up their technical support, and they were as usual unhelpful. The guy said my server was down because I couldn't ping it and almost ignored the fact that I said I could see it running on the serial console just fine. He recommended another option, which is rebooting the machine over the network in a Debian recovery mode. He then said something about mounting a readable file system or some such crap. I knew I wasn't going to do that.
After a bit of thinking, I started doing some queries on Google. I searched a lot about 1and1 nameservers and was finding mostly the wrong stuff. Then I realized that I wanted the 1and1 dhcp information. There I found quickly that the 1and1 root servers need this weird routing configuration in /etc/network/interfaces:
up ip route add 10.255.255.1/32 dev eth0 up ip route add default via 10.255.255.1
Weird. Once I put those in there and refreshed the connection, all was well. Nice.
So I learned a bit, got frustrated a bit, and am still fairly happy with my hosting decision. I mean, when have you ever bought hosting services and ever been totally satisfied? And when do those support people know what they're talking about? As my dad says, "Never is a long time," but I think in this case it fits.
Measuring Your Web Visitors
Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics can provide a lot of useful information, but you have to dig through the data and know where to look. Of course, for large companies, there are the expensive, full-featured packages such as WebSideStory and WebTrends. I recently found this interview with Jim Sterne, who seems to be a leader in this field. I found some good ways to think about Analytics. Many people try to say that there's no way to get accurate information about your visitors, but he counters that you can discern changes in user behavior and figure out most of what is going on. If you're trying to market your own website, I would recommend giving this a read.
The Year 2007 Problem
I'd heard this mentioned a number of times, but it doesn't seem to be getting enough coverage. This Sunday, March 11th, starts Daylight Savings Time (DST) here in the United States. When I heard that, I thought to myself, "That's a bit earlier than past years, isn't it?" I always remember it being around the time of Easter.
As it turns out, Daylight Savings Time has been changed for the first time since 1966 by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Apparently some lobbyist convinced someone that it would be helpful to make DST a bit longer. (Long-time readers may remember that I blogged about this before it passed.) Sure enough, the idiots did this and now we could have some problems.
It seems my Debian server doesn't get the clue yet, although most sources online say that distributions from the last year or so should be patched correctly. Windows machines that have Automatic Update should be patched correctly. If you run some servers, you may want to check it out. It seems here's a good place to start.
ConceptShare: Web Collaboration for Designers
This tool might become the best friend of web designers and layout people from around the web. With ConceptShare, you can use their free, web-based collaboration tool for any design project you're working on. This short tour gives a quick look at what you could do with it. I bet some web development companies with clients in other states or countries could really use something like this instead of trying to talk about a design over the phone because you can highlight and draw basic outlines on the image itself as well as leave comments. Of course, it would work to collaborate with other graphics/media types as well as web design, but my focus is definitely web-related.
Server Upgrades
Just a quick note to people who are using any of the sites on my server. We just finished upgrading the Apache webserver. We also may do some playing around with it this afternoon. If you notice anything odd, feel free to contact me so i know it needs fixing.
The New Missionaries
My friends Rus, Nick, and Jon have given the next couple years of their lives to be missionaries. No, they're not in Africa or India. They're missionaries to a part of the city of Indianapolis in the state of Indiana, right here in the United States. Why? It's simple.
These men are not preaching some "you need to be saved or you'll go to hell" gospel. They're preaching the Gospel of life together in a Christian community. They're not trying to count the number of people they've brought to Christ, they're making friends to share life with in Christ. Just check this out:
Their brand new blog is a great place to learn more about what they're doing and what the People of Praise is bringing to the world. Of course, feel free to join the discussion there about what life in Christ really looks like.
For my friends in the People of Praise who want yet another easy way to get started with blogs, I've put together a current OPML file of all the blog feeds. Save this to your desktop and then import it into your feed reader such as Google Reader. The only downside is that this won't automatically update. However, I've included the feed of People of Praise member blogs with it so that you'll be notified of new blogs. Enjoy!
Update: Justin noted to me that this file does not include The Bunge. Don't miss it or you'll miss out, seriously.